Tofu - A Historical Perspective
'The Book Of Tofu ' by William Shurtleff (1975) is the ultimate resource on TOFU:
The authors of this book met and studied under a Zen Master for several years where they learned
to value a natural food diet. They were driven to bring more of the East to the West, through a shared
interest in the traditional life-styles and arts of the Far East. "Each morning we walked to our
neighbour-hood tofu shop - one of 38,000 scattered throughout Japan. I had never imagined that tofu
could be coaxed into such a range of forms and textures, nor that it could combine harmoniously with
so many different foods and flavours."
From visiting tofu restaurants in Japan and studying under the head cook, taking notes, trying to absorb
the subtleties of his art as he prepared each of his specialties; to locating the legendary tofu made by
grandmothers in the mountainous back country, who taught a simple way of making tofu unknown to
even the more professional craftsmen with whom they had studied.
As we continued our work, several simple facts came together to broaden our perspective. The
writing of nutrtionists, ecologists, and experts studying world food and population problems convinced
us that a meat-centred diet makes very inefficient use of the earth's ability to provide mankind with
protein. It soon seemed to us imperative that West learn to use soybeans directly as a source of
high-quality protein,as people in the East Asia have been doing for thousands of years.
Over a period of 3 years, we prepared and enjoyed more than 1,200 tofu dishes. As our work
neared completion, we realized that perhaps our finest teacher had been tofu itself. Like water that
flows through the world, serving as it moves along, tofu joyfully surrenders itself to the endless play of
transformation: sizzling, broiling, bubbling, deep-fried, frozen. A true democrat in spirit, tofu presents
the same face to rich and poor alike. It is indispensable in the diet of more than 900 million people.
Since earliest times, the people of East Asia have honoured tofu as "meat of the fields" and "meat
without a bone" In the coming decades and centuries, tofu could nurture people around the world."